Giant Silkmoths not only delivers sensational images of these dramatic and devastating insects, it also supplies a new way of looking at them.
Simon Barnes, The Times, Saturday 3 December 2011
The perfect present for nature lovers, as well as anyone interested in butterflies and moths, whether for their incredible adaptions or for the beauty of the photography. Buy online and for Christmas from the Papadakis online shop
For anyone who missed Simon Barnes’s eye-opening article in The Times, you can read it below:
Moths and the art of mimicry
Simon Barnes
A gorgeous picture book offers sensational images of some dramatic and devastating creatures of the night
How can I know if you’re seeing the same thing that I am? I can’t. I can only make assumptions. You might be colour-blind. You might suffer from astigmatism and find in El Greco a plodding literal truth rather than a devastating reinterpretation of reality. You might have synaesthetic gifts and have a visual impression of sound.
So how can you or I or any mere human know how a bird sees the world?
A bird’s brain is wired differently. Most birds have their eyes set on either side of their head, which is great for all-round vision and looking out for enemies but doesn’t deliver the intense sense of three-dimensional space that those of us with two-eyed vision possess.
Which brings us to moths, and to what must surely be the loveliest picture-book of the year, on wildlife or any other subject. Philip Howse’s book Giant Silkmoths not only delivers sensational images of these dramatic and devastating insects, it also supplies a new way of looking at them.
A new way of looking at the world, a new way of seeing. It’s M.C. Escher, it’s Salvador Dalí, it’s every handbook on psychedelia that cluttered the shelves in the 60s. This is moths and the politics of ecstasy. And it’s all about how these enormous insects manage to avoid getting eaten by birds. They do so by distorting reality.
The great snag of being a giant moth is that it takes so long to get out of bed of an evening. That means you can’t get away quickly if you become aware of an insect-eating bird. These cold-blooded animals must raise their temperature to 30 degrees before they can get airborne. The process of activating the flight muscles can take eight minutes. It is called shivering, and at that point the moth is tremendously vulnerable.
The trick, then, is to hide while in full view. It’s movement that most often attracts the eye: these moths must hide while moving. They must be invisible while standing on the touchline doing their warm-up. And that’s where these acid visions come into their own.
It’s hard, if not impossible, to understand these tricks when looking at specimens pinned out on a board. This is a great way of telling one species from another, but it doesn’t tell you how moths live. Moths look different when they are alive, even to humans. They look radically different from birds.
Howse has looked at these moths with his own birdy eye and seen things the birdy way. He has found that the eye spots of many species look quite different when the animal is head down and moving: the enemy bird gets a sudden vivid impression of an owl or a snake and backs off at once.
There are other tricks still harder to get your head round. Some moths take on the appearance of a distant deer or a bear. This doesn’t sound even remotely convincing to us binocular-visioned humans, but a bird, seeing with only one eye, is unable to make clear judgments about distance and is taken in by the illusion.
By now Howse is getting into his stride and showing us a moth that looks like the foot of a giant cat, complete with claws, another that looks like a small mammal with ears and whiskers. Birds are more sensitive to colours at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum: some moths, enhanced by colour photography, carry the silhouette of a predatory bird, a brilliantly witty illusion. This is a book to boggle at, and it tells us that the natural world has more things to boggle at than we are capable of imagining.
Giant Silkmoths: Colour, Mimicry and Camouflage by Philip Howse and Kirby Wolfe (Papadakis, RRP £25).
To read this article on the website of the Oxford Times, please go to: 
